Seeing Dogs: The Highlight of Eleanor’s First Day in Florence (Summer 2009)

A couple of summers ago we spent a few weeks in Italy.  The bulk of our time was spent in the Piedmont region, and I wrote an earlier entry about visiting the 13th century fortress above the small village of Vogogna where we stayed. This brief video captures the end of our first day in Florence. We had been moving at a good clip all day, and our daughter, Eleanor, had been amazing–she has always been a good traveler. The restaurant was just steps from our hotel, The Hotel Roma, in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella. The true heat of the day had started to fade.[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjHjdzyzyv0&w=420&h=315]When I took a look at this video again recently, however, I noticed that we were not the best parents in that moment. Eleanor did a pretty good job with our fill in the blank test even though she would have preferred to talk about all the dogs she saw while we navigated the city. In the earlier entry I argued to let kids narrate: unfortunately, we neglected to take that advice here…at least on camera. We fed her what we wanted her to say, and when she didn’t say it, we answered for her. Fortunately, Eleanor was not as serious as we were.